Recluse Spider Bite Eats Hole in Young Woman's Ear

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One woman's Italian vacation took a turn for the worse when she
woke up with pain in her ear one night. She had no way of knowing
then that she'd just been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse
spider, and that a chunk of her ear would soon be liquefied by
the spider's venom. But that's exactly what happened, according
to a recent report of her case.

The 22-year-old woman soon sought treatment for her pain in an
Italian hospital, where doctors prescribed an antihistamine. But
the swelling in her face and pain in her ear didn't get any
better. Once she was back home in the Netherlands, the ear got
worse, and portions of it turned black — a clear sign that the
skin and cartilage cells were dead.

The dead tissue made it clear to doctors that the woman had been
bitten by a Mediterranean recluse, a spider whose bite is known
to destroy skin and underlying fat, causing "sunken-in" scars or
"a disfigured ear, if you are very unlucky," said Dr. Marieke van
Wijk, a plastic surgeon in the Netherlands involved in the
woman's treatment. [ Related:
Girl's Brown Recluse Spider Bite Turns into Open Wound ]

The case is the first evidence that recluse-spider venom can also
destroy ear cartilage, said van Wijk, a co-author of the case
report, published last month in the Journal of Plastic,
Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery.

Venom from recluse spiders, including the American brown
recluse and its Mediterranean cousin, kills skin and fat with
a mixture of chemicals, including substances that break down
proteins. The complex nature of the venom makes the bites hard to
treat, van Wijk said. A drug called Dapsone has been used, but
there is no proof that it works to treat these bites, she added.

Therefore, the recommended treatments for these spider bites are
icepacks and painkillers, van Wijk told LiveScience.

In this case, van Wijk and her colleagues removed the dead
tissue, and recreated it using cartilage from the woman's ribs.

Recluse
spiders rarely bite people, and when they do, the bites don't
usually inflict serious damage or large scars. Most bites occur
when people roll over onto a spider while asleep, or when they
put their foot into a shoe in which a recluse is found. It's
difficult to diagnose a brown-recluse-spider bite, and many
suspected bites actually come from stinging insects, or are
caused by other things, such as bacterial infections.

The spiders are "not that dangerous," van Wijk said. "I wouldn't
take precautions, but if one develops a mysterious
red-white-and-blue and swollen lesion in summer, in an endemic
region, keep the brown recluse in mind," she added.

In a small minority of cases of recluse bites, the venom can
cause a severe immune reaction that destroys blood cells. A
recent study found that a
drug used to treat unrelated rare blood disorders,
eculizumab, may be able to reduce the destruction of blood cells
in these patients by 80 percent.